Sex in the Movies: Hollywood's Double Standard

Does Hollywood have a double standard when it comes showing oral sex in the movies? Cosmopolitan.com's Darla Murrayexplores the concept.

Filmmaker Leslye Headland is gearing up for a fight. Her next movie,Sleeping With Other People, opens with a scene of a man going down on a woman from behind, and she is certain she's going to end up in front of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) defending her film.

"I would be lying if I didn't say that as I was writing it I was thinking I cannot wait to fight this!" she says.

Headland, who wrote and directed 2012's Bachelorette, believes it's important to show sex onscreen because it is an integral part of the storytelling process. "Sex is such a personal thing," she says. "As an artist I can't just reference it and know that everyone is thinking about the same sex. I have to show them what sex I'm talking about."

She also says that, for her films to resonate with today's audience, the trite romantic-comedy formula won't do. She doesn't name specific movies, but think Ginnifer Goodwin's character in Something Borrowed who pines over her best friend for years until they finally hook up. "Nobody is fucking in those movies the way people fuck now. Are you kidding me? You don't sit around and pine after a guy until he asks you out," she says. "You sleep with each other, and then you might talk about what's going on. So I can't tell a truthful story without showing that stuff." For Headland, her story is always more important than the rating and jokes, and she's aware that this may mean her film will become the first NC-17 romantic comedy.

As filmmakers balance artistic vs. commercial ambitions, though, not everyone is so unwilling to make changes to their films, and some do so in order to avoid the doomed-for commercial-failure NC-17 label. Such was allegedly the case for the new movie Charlie Countryman. On November 27, actress Evan Rachel Wood took to Twitter to express her contempt for the MPAA, claiming director Fredrik Bond had removed a scene in which Shia LaBeouf's character goes down on hers. Woods' multi-tweet criticism concluded with the suggestion that the MPAA has a double standard when it comes to censorship: "It's hard for me to believe that had the roles been reversed it still would have been cut."

Headland, for one, was excited. "I kind of ardently track this kind of thing because I am a female filmmaker, and I am interested in women receiving oral sex in general," she says.

The MPAA has a policy to not discuss specific films, but in response to Wood's accusations, the head of the MPAA, Joan Graves, tells Cosmo, "I personally can tell you that I am very frustrated to see coverage like this that has no basis on fact at all. And all I can tell you is we frequently get used against to gain attention for a film with things that are not the case." Graves also insists that there is no double standard when it comes to rating sex on screen.

Jill Soloway, who directed this year's Afternoon Delight, disagrees. "I wish you could say it's a double standard, but it's too gentle of a phrase," she says. "I think female pleasure must have the potential to explode the entire planet. It must be that dangerous because people are working so hard to make sure that no one sees it."

Soloway believes this is actually a problem that goes beyond the MPAA and is a reflection of the film industry and American society. "There is a patriarchal system of storytelling, of filmmaking, of books, of belief, that literally aids the division of the woman and the slut," she says. "It depends on the idea that good women don't experience desire or pleasure, and that bad women who do are punished."

This isn't the first time this issue has come up. In 2010 Blue Valentine attracted attention when it initially got hit with an NC-17 label because of an act of cunnilingus. (Harvey Weinstein appealed the decision, and the film was released with the date-friendly R rating.) And in 2003 director Wayne Kramer claimed in Variety that his film The Cooler"got slammed with an NC-17 for a scene of 'suggested' oral sex." It was ultimately released with an R rating after some editing. According to film historian and documentarian Elaina Arthur, we've been having this conversation since the '30s. "This has been an ongoing struggle," she says. "There has always been a tug-of-war between censorship and the artist."

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Female actors have long fought for equality of sexual expression onscreen, Arthur says. "Mae West enjoyed sex and she fought to remove the double standard where only a man can enjoy sexual pleasure with multiple partners," she says. "Mae would say, 'I'm going to do what I want and I'm going to produce it and I'm going to write it and bring on the bad press if you want to because all press is good press.' I love the fact that she used to write her scripts to be even more racy than they ended up because she knew what she was doing. They would trim back, and she would laugh."

The current MPAA rating system emerged in 1968, when then-chairman Jack Valenti replaced the earlier moral censorship guidelines, known as the Hays Code, with a parent-focused rating system. Graves says it's supposed to reflect the standards of the American parents, not set it, and on their website they also claim to champion the creative and artistic freedoms of filmmakers. "We do everything in context, just like a parent sitting in a theater," she says. "It is the graphics and the amount of material in a film that leads us to rate something at a specific level. It has nothing to do with the sexual gender at all."

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However, many artists, like Wood, feel at odds with the MPAA, yet have to strike a balance between how strongly they feel about a scene and how much they want their film to make it to theaters with a certain rating. "I considered retweeting what Evan Rachel Wood said, but I do not want to be in bad standing with the MPAA in any way," Soloway admits.

Recently, some filmmakers are choosing to eschew theatrical releases in favor of nontraditional forms of distribution such as iTunes or Video On Demand to avoid the rating process altogether. And, as Headland points out, Netflix has shown the possibilities in terms of original series. "Look at something like Orange Is the New Black," she says. "It's a whole female-driven storyline and a full female cast. Holy shit. Lesbianism. Can you imagine poor [Orange creator] Jenji Kohan trying to pitch that anywhere? But Netflix is like, 'Let's do it.'"

Other creative types are finding greater freedom on television.

"It is fascinating to me that there are very likely more restrictions in a movie than there would be on cable," says Michelle Ashford, creator of Showtime's Master's of Sex. "It just shows you what a crazy, fabulous place cable television has become, and I mean that in the best way. They have never said anything to us, 'Make it cleaner or safer' or 'Pull it back.' The only parameter in terms of what we put on and what we don't is just what we're comfortable with."

Masters of Sex has been applauded for its portrayal of female sexuality — Virginia Johnson asks for oral sex in the first episode — and Ashford says it's the unintentional outcome of having a predominantly female writing team. "It's simply a filter through which your decision-making process goes. You can't separate yourself from your sex. When people say, 'Oh, you can really tell your show has a female voice to it,' I'm like, 'Well, it's going to. That is simply because I'm a woman.'"

She doesn't believe that Hollywood is deliberately anti-female oral sex, but because it's still a male-dominated industry, much of what we're seeing is from a man's perspective. "You're probably not going to find a lot of guys sitting around in rooms saying, 'Are we really accurately portraying female sexuality?'" she says.

Soloway says she's noticed a shift even in the past decade, as TV hasn't always been so comfortable with showing female pleasure either. "I remember I was writing on Six Feet Under. There was this scene where Claire was going to have an orgasm, and I think the network kicked it back," she says. "That was HBO at the time, not so much now."

And as the gender imbalance in Hollywood continues to level with more women going into film, Soloway believes the onscreen portayal of the female sexual experience will become even more accepted. "I think [things will change] as things get diversified away from the kind of what I call 'golf-course males' — men who would stand on a golf course and go, 'Oh, who are we casting in that movie anyway? Oh yeah, that cute young Jennifer Lawrence, I like her, that's fine.'"

In the meantime, not only are more women telling the stories they want to tell, they're also willing to challenge the system. "It's a fight I am so willing and excited to fight," Headland says. "You never know until you do it and you challenge people. There may be eight more movies like Charlie Countryman before something happens, but eventually it's going to get old."

UPDATE: Evan Rachel Wood responded to this article with a series of tweets: